[tex-k] Re: Bug#249466: dvips: Landscape papers handled in an idotic way

[Frank Küster]

retitle 249466 dvips: can't use two -t options when papersize is encoded in dvi
stop


Juhapekka Tolvanen <juhtolv at cc.jyu.fi> wrote:

> Please, come from the stone age: Rest of the universe know, that the proper
> way to express landscape-oriented A4-paper is "A4R" or "a4r". Have you
> idiots seen for example copier machines? 

Thank you for your polite suggestion. 

> It is so much simpler. And now go and make it possible to use options
> like these:

And no YOU go and reformulate this in a way so that we can forward it as
a request to the dvips team, without insulting them.

No, don't do it. This is not a problem of dvips. Or if it is, it might
be a problem of a stupid error message, or not of dvips alone. It
depends on dvips' interaction with "clever" packages. Look at the test
document below. As it is, you can run it through LaTeX and then through
dvips with two -t options and get a landscape document (it's rotated by
180 degrees when viewed with gv, but that's not the problem here):

$ dvips -t a4 -t landscape landscape.dvi 
This is dvips(k) 5.92b Copyright 2002 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
' TeX output 2004.05.17:1905' -> landscape.ps
<texc.pro><f7b6d320.enc><texps.pro>. <cmr12.pfb>[1] [2] 


Only if you remove the comment before the hyperref package, then you get
the error message:

$ dvips -t a4 -t landscape landscape.dvi 
This is dvips(k) 5.92b Copyright 2002 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
' TeX output 2004.05.17:1904' -> landscape.ps
dvips: both landscape and papersize specified:  ignoring landscape
<texc.pro><f7b6d320.enc><texps.pro><special.pro>. <cmr12.pfb>[1] [2] 


It seems the page size information that hyperref writes into the dvi
file is not appropriate for dvips. It might be a bug in hyperref,
because also dvipdfm does not recognize the paper format correctly. 

TeX-k team, do you know about this?
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie